Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World: Finding Meaning in an Uncomfortable World - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Serene Jones is the president of the historic Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. The first woman to head the 180-year-old institution, Jones occupies the Johnston Family Chair for Religion and Democracy. She is the past president of the American Academy of Religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University, where she was the Titus Street Professor of Theology at the Divinity School, and chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Jones is the author of several books including Trauma and Grace. She is a child of the Oklahoma plains, a daughter of a university president and a single mother, a sister, a cancer survivor, a theologian, a minister, a news commentator, a public intellectual, and a devoted teacher.

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Chapter 1

Prairie Theology

The grace of God, which dwells in my house, will not leave it desolate.

John Calvin,

Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559

A large painting of an Oklahoma landscape hangs in my New York living room, as it has hung in each home I've lived in since I left the American plains in 1981. It depicts a solitary oil rig surrounded by scattered pieces of drilling equipment and work trailers. The rig stands tall against an empty field of wheat and a shockingly blue sky. More than once I've realized that it captures something basic about my theology. It shows the immensity and gracefulness of my home place but also captures its paradoxes, crude and uncertain. A human creation, the rig contrasts sharply with the nature that surrounds it, especially the huge cloudless sky that fills most of the painting. John Randolph, a well-known Oklahoma artist, gave this painting to my parents years ago, when we lived in the small town of Enid, in the heart of Garfield County, previously known as the Cherokee Strip, a part of what the federal government called the Oklahoma Territory.
The reddish yellow of the prairie and the bright blue sky are so strong that people who aren't from Oklahoma often miss the fact that there's an oil rig in the picture, its unseen pipelines driven deep into the dirt below. No one from Oklahoma misses it, though. Oklahomans who visit my apartment immediately imagine what is going on underground. There's no doubt in their minds but that the large metal figure is busy pumping out black sludge that translates into money. Lots of it. Nowadays, my Oklahoman houseguests can't help but think about the earthquakes caused by these rigs, too. One friend, who told me she sometimes feels several small earthquakes a day in her home there, said that the moment she looked at the painting she saw the landscape fracturing into pieces.
A study in what is seen and unseen, the picture is uniquely American: a richly colored story of land, sky, machines, and people and their struggles to find place, power, and wealth. For some, it mattered little how cruel the cost of their struggle would be. For others, mere survival was their only goal, never fame or fortune. Just life. For most, the struggle fell somewhere between the two, their complex lives captured well by the painting's contradictions.
It also summons, for me, theology, albeit theology told in a uniquely American way. I call it prairie theology.
I was taught this "prairie" version of American theology from the time I could walk. The church where I learned it is not well known today, although during its nineteenth-century glory days it was celebrated as the cutting-edge rebel of American Protestantism. Eventually called the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the church started as a social movement designed to unite all Christians through the creation of a nationwide fellowship that transcended the many disparate doctrines and denominational divides that had long cluttered the Protestant landscape. My great-grandparents joined the movement when it first swept across the plains into the Oklahoma Territory in the late 1800s. They liked its simplicity; the pithy slogan "No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible" summed it all up for them.
These early Disciples didn't like hierarchies, which meant that clergy were given no pride of place and minimal performative staging on Sunday mornings. Regular people, not special priests, presided over communion services, which consisted of grape juice and bread shared around a spare wooden table every time people gathered. The Disciples were uncomfortable with anything that smelled even slightly like church decorum; they insisted that just like Jesus, God did not care about creeds or liturgies or incense, or for that matter, about social position or racial rank. In God's eyes, everyone was equal.
This dogged insistence on equality was applied to salvation as well: everyone-even bad guys-was equally saved. They were unabashed universalists. No salvation ladder hung over our heads, waiting for the most strenuously virtuous of us to grab it and lead the way up to heaven. Salvation wasn't a contest. It consisted of the bare fact that as in life, after we die, God loves us. All of us. There was nothing more to add. The salvation playing field was as flat as an Oklahoma wheat field. Little did I realize how radical this would sound when compared with the punishment/reward theology that still dominates so many American churches.
This meant that threats and promises about heaven and hell, that great Protestant pastime, rarely appeared in family conversations or at church. Much heavier emphasis was put on our belief in a God who loved and forgave everyone's sins. Because we so ardently championed forgiveness, it was impossible to imagine why a forgiving God would decide to punish some and save others. Saints and sinners, we were all in the same boat when it came to the ultimate truth about our lives: We were all justified by God's grace alone, which was good news.
As for sin, my church steered away from the commonplace American obsession with sexual morality, instead focusing on social injustice and its moral roots in pride and greed. It was as much about public morals as private ones. The challenge of living faithfully, then, was not about being perfect but rather being honest enough to catch yourself when "unloving" feelings or actions reared their nasty heads in your day-to-day interactions. When you saw greed and arrogance running wild in your heart or in the streets, they had to be called out. Our Sunday school lesson books did not include the usual list of personal prohibitions but rather gentle advice on how to better "love your neighbor as yourself." We also learned to keep our eyes on the local political stage for similar attitudes toward others so that, as good Christians, we could live together as equals in a just society, like the early disciples.
"No question about it. Jesus teaches the greatest sin of all is racism!" my elderly white Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Walker, explained to our all-white junior-high youth group one Sunday morning as we sat in the overheated trailer that served as our Sunday-morning classroom.
"So," she said, "don't let the fact that you are white lead you to think you are special or better." She looked at our barely nodding heads, wrongly assuming no further discussion was needed. It was so typically Disciples-like, to make bold assertions about theology and social justice together and to believe it would make obvious sense to everyone.
That Sunday, Reverend Larry preached that "the sin of greed is the greatest of all" as he then moved on to talk about how the early disciples had shared everything, "giving to each according to their need.
"I know it's not popular to say so these days, but Jesus's early disciples were"-he leaned forward to confidentially share with the congregation at the end of the sermon-" . . . COMMUNISTS." My kid brain had no idea what "communist" meant. But I got the bigger point. We were supposed to share what we had. For me, that meant giving twenty cents of my weekly dollar allowance to the church as my tithe against poverty.
This all made good sense to the movement's early followers, most of them poor and uneducated, many of them social outcasts of one form or another. The theology of these downtrodden believers reminded them always that even though each and every one of them was a sinner, in God's hands they were all forgiven and graced. This sense of all-encompassing love had to make the brutal prairie life-so full of failure, hunger, violence, and hardship-more bearable and explicable. We so often, I later came to realize, find the version of theology that our life needs.
Not surprisingly, this theology provided fertile ground for the populist and socialist sentiments that flourished in Oklahoma's early...